There will be no more nude photos in Playboy magazine. The news comes straight from company CEO Scott Flanders, who spoke of the magazine's future plans in a lengthy feature published in the New York Times.
Flanders told the Times that the internet - and its endless reserves of pornographic content - have made these revealing photos 'passe.' He says, "You're now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it's just passé at this juncture."
The overhauled magazine will still feature a playmate of the month and photos of women in risqué poses, but they will fall safely under the PG-13 banner. Cory Jones, one of the top editors at the magazine, says the new photo policy will emulate the 'racier side of Instagram.'
These decisions were all signed-off by Hugh Hefner, the magazine's founder and long running Editor-in-Chief.
The decision to axe nudity from the print version doesn't come as a surprise to many. Back in August of last year, the magazine's website eliminated all nude photos.
This drastic reinvention of the brand is seen as an attempt to correct flagging sales and circulation numbers and target a new generation of young, urban-dwelling male readers.
Regardless of one's opinion on the magazine's content and depiction of women, its place in pop culture history cannot be denied. This excerpt from the article says it best.
It is difficult, in a media market that has been so fragmented by the web, to imagine the scope of Playboy's influence at its peak. A judge once ruled that denying blind people a Braille version of it violated their First Amendment rights. It published stories by Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami among others, and its interviews have included Malcolm X, Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jimmy Carter, who admitted that he had lusted in his heart for women other than his wife. Madonna, Sharon Stone and Naomi Campbell posed for the magazine at the peak of their fame. Its best-selling issue, in November of 1972, sold more than seven million copies.
